Thousands of routes require some patience, planning

About 96,000 students take the bus

Damascus Elementary School guidance counselor Delyza Howard leads a group of kindergartners to their classroom Monday. About 96,000 students ride buses to Montgomery County Public Schools.

This is time of year, Linda Privette is downright joyous to startle from her sleep with solutions to the thorniest of bus-routing conundrums.

Busy season for the county school system's bus-routing specialists runs from May to October, peaking into the last few hectic weeks as Privette and her fellow routers hammer out schedules for 96,000 students.

Routing the county's 90,000-plus general curriculum students is fairly straightforward, explains Todd Watkins, director of transportation administration. Other than a new school or housing complex — and the steady migration upcounty — planning those routes amounts more or less to tweaking the prior year's templates.

Getting the other 5,000 riders to school is fraught with complication as Privette and seven colleagues at the school system's satellite office in a Gaithersburg strip mall plot routes for those who study somewhere other than their neighborhood school — special education, gifted-and-talented or homeless students.

Routes used to be schemed on wall-sized maps with pushpins and colored yarn. More than a decade later, the task now falls almost entirely to a computer program that calculates thousands of combinations for student, stop and bus route.

But the work needs a human touch. And with the added vantage of being a former driver, Privette, 45, knows well that behind each "S" blinking on her computer screen is a student.

"It's become my passion. I tell you, I think I wake up almost every night dreaming about routing" Privette said Thursday as she worked on a student's new bus route. "And if I haven't figured something out by the time I go home, I've woken up in the middle of the night, I know where I can put that kid!' It is, this job is hard, it's overwhelming — and I love it. It's just such a great sense of satisfaction."

The phones at the 20-person office in the Festival Shopping Center were noticeably silent Thursday during a practice run to acquaint drivers with their routes and orient new students with their schools and schedules.

Most of the routes were in place, except for the stack of last-minute requests in the empty cubicle next to Privette's desk. As they push into high gear to tackle the inevitable first-week snafus — overbooked buses, students put on the wrong route or forgotten — Watkins likened the 11th-hour routine to piecing together a puzzle, albeit one in constant flux.

"We try to change that one piece of the puzzle while affecting as few other pieces as we can," Watkins said. "But sometimes you have to affect a whole bunch to get one to work."